by Matt Cardin
Powers looked at him for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, then. I admire your dedication. You’ll come and see me, won’t you? Please don’t let this much time go by again. You’ll suffocate by yourself in that basement.”
But Thornton had already checked out of the conversation. He was already retreating back into himself and into the new world he had come to inhabit. “Thanks again,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk and rising to his feet. “I’ll update you when it’s finished. Because I will finish.” He was already out the office door and heading through the gallery toward the exit to Equine Street when he called back over his shoulder, “I will finish.”
The words reverberated through the empty expanse of the gallery as though it were an underground cave.
* * *
Powers, standing in his office doorway, watched Thornton’s receding form through the glass panes of the main door. He looked down and rubbed the toe of his polished black shoe idly on a floor tile. Then he began switching off the lights and preparing to leave for the night.
His path took him at last to Thornton’s The Luster of Yellowed Bones. Before he turned off the ceiling row of LED can lights that illuminated the wall, he paused to study the painting, even though he’d seen it literally a thousand times. And for that thousandth time he wondered what could possibly compel a person, even someone with as gruesomely repulsive an artistic imagination as Erik Thornton, to paint a picture of such galling horror. It literally made Powers shiver to see the undefined shapes in the foreground, performing horrendous acts on an equally undefined additional shape, while in the background, an even more indistinct entity presided over the proceedings like a stage director, or a puppet master, or an emperor, or perhaps all three. Beyond those roles loomed some vague but tangible presence that not only combined and encompassed the others, but transcended them and thereby put the viewer of the painting in touch with meanings from a sphere beyond mere art.
That Thornton could, through his use of nothing but color, shape, texture, and compositional techniques both conventional and unconventional, imbue the master entity with such an aspect of transcendental significance was virtually miraculous.
No less cunning was the manner in which he somehow imbued the same figure, which lacked any concrete characteristics, with an aspect of infernal delight and delectation, suffusing the entire painting with a sense of overwhelming dread. And yet, the true anchor point of the whole work was the undefined shape in the foreground that was the receiver of all this awfulness, condemned to hang there on the canvas forever, unable to cry out, unable to escape, unable even to understand the nature of its own suffering and horror.
After a moment of considering all this, Powers switched off the lights and exited the gallery, still brooding as he locked the front doors.
Yes. Unquestionably yes. Erik Thornton would be able to satisfy the desires of Tony Anthony, no matter how outlandish or unpleasant they might ultimately prove to be.
Of that, Bernard Powers was certain.
5. The Opening
The next morning, Thornton—sequestered in the depths of Anthony’s mansion—glanced yet again at his wristwatch. 11:06. The weak white glow of a cloud-covered sky spilled through the narrow windows above like ice water. The sheet-covered figures sat silent in their strange array, almost begging to have their shrouds lifted and their mysteries exposed. The alcove where his works hung resembled the darkened passageway to an alternate dimension, with Thornton’s paintings positioned like panes in an otherworldly French door, beckoning entry to a kaleidoscopic nightmare on the other side. Thornton sat on his stool brooding over all these things, still mired in misery, still failing, still desperate and feverish and bereft of any clue about how to proceed.
But now he had a new companion, one who promised to see him through this impasse: anger. And another fine friend: hatred.
Anger and hatred for Anthony. For Powers. For all the fatuous aristocrats who had attended Thornton’s recent exhibition and strutted like peacocks in mating season. Most of all, anger and hatred for himself, because of his stupidity in taking this job, and his foolishness in thinking that he had ever been an artist of professional standing.
Because of this universal loathing, he now possessed a limitless desire to silence and humiliate everyone, including himself, by proving them wrong. Not just wrong about him, but wrong about everything. Whatever it was, any and all thoughts and beliefs, attitudes and assumptions, he wanted to prove them wrong and himself wrong with them. He wanted to negate everything, to obliterate it all, to overturn the universe and see them all—including himself—gaping in horror as the stark glare of revealed reality annihilated their blinkered denials and the world they protected.
He had not eaten since the previous morning. He had not slept except for a couple of fitful hours, during which he had stared in paralyzed dread at the hooded figure rising from the black pool. The nightmare had returned, and though it horrified him, he also inexplicably welcomed it.
Sitting alone in the tomblike silence of Tony Anthony’s secret gallery, he felt that he might shatter into a thousand pieces at the onset of any sudden noise or motion. The palette was in his right hand, the brush in his left. The canvas rested bare and dull before him. He raised the brush, then lowered it. In the background of his sight, behind the canvas, the Hatchlings watched in mockery, their open mouths howling with silent laughter.
In the foreground, with no warning, soundlessly, the canvas became a window. The barrier of its surface shuddered and dropped away, and the resulting rectangular aperture began to glow with the inverted light of a black sun, as blinding as a welder’s arc. An iridescent outline formed itself there, and with an insight born from some obscure place within him—the place where his muse resided, the place whose real nature and location had always eluded him—Thornton realized that he was seeing the completion of the thematic vista portrayed in the other paintings. The canvas had at last become the final pane in the door. All he had to do was recreate with his paints the vision of otherworldly access that he was now seeing stenciled on the canvas. The knowledge was clear, immediate, and undeniable. He was being handed the greatest work of his life, as if someone were showing him a work already completed, and he had merely to put it into concrete form for the rest of the world to see.
“Hail and farewell,” he murmured aloud, and then wondered what he even meant by it. Like a wayfarer dipping a torch into a slick, gleaming pool of pitch and setting it ablaze to light the way, he swirled the colors from the palette onto the brush and began to mark the canvas with the outlines of an impossible truth.
* * *
Elsewhere in the mansion, three floors above the basement, Tony Anthony sat alone in his study. Six video monitors squatted in a row on his massive oaken desk, displaying color images of Erik Thornton from six different angles. With one hand, Anthony delivered forkfuls of a delicate French pastry to his mouth from a gold-rimmed bone-china dish. With the other hand, he held a small remote-control device.
On the screens, the artist sat motionless and slumped, just as he had done for most of the preceding two weeks. But suddenly, for no visible reason, his posture shifted and his body language changed. He rose to his feet, standing ramrod straight, with his eyes blazing and his jaw set. Anthony set his fork on the dish and leaned toward the screens. He watched Thornton mix colors together and raise his hand, bearing a brush, to begin marking the canvas for the first time since his abortive experiment a few days earlier. Without taking his eyes off the screens, Anthony pressed a button on the remote to start the rack of video recorders on the wall beside him.
Thornton continued to move his arm and hand. Soon his movements became vivid and violent. He backed away and shouted at the canvas, then rushed forward to stab and slash it with the brush. The canvas rocked on its easel from the violence of the attack. The artist’s motions became even more frenzied. He laughed wildly, the tinny sound of it spilling through the small speakers on Anthony’s desk.<
br />
The ghost of a smile curled the corner of Anthony’s lips. Clearly, he thought, the moment had arrived. The culmination was afoot. Still watching the monitors, he took a sip of wine from the glass before him, a rare red Romanian Muscat, and felt the liquid warm him all the way down. It was an effect he savored.
He tilted his face upward to gaze at the massive image that dominated the twenty-foot-high main wall of the study. His books had once rested on shelves there, many years ago, until they had taught him everything they could. He had then turned to other ways of gaining the knowledge he sought. On that wall was displayed a single painting, centuries old and awesome in both size and subject. It depicted a hooded figure with glowing yellow eyes, rising out of a pool of oily, vile blackness.
Anthony raised his glass to the figure. “Soon,” he said. “Very soon now. You and I. Face to face.” Taking another sip, he stared into the enormous yellow eyes in the painting, eyes that burned with a fire from beyond this world. After a moment, his own pupils dilated sharply. His left eye tugged inward even more than usual, and with his skewed vision, he saw the figure stir into motion and begin to rise, while the black pool seethed and bubbled.
6. The Wraiths
Thornton finished the painting in three days. He worked at a feverish pace, pausing only for the briefest of interims each night to retreat back to his attic apartment and snatch a couple of hours of fitful sleep before heading back up The Mountain. The dream had once again disappeared, but as he had experienced on the morning after its first arrival, he could feel the hooded figure watching him from behind every surface of the waking world.
For nourishment, he took only a hasty bite of leftovers from his refrigerator each morning as he dashed out of his apartment to return to the studio, high on The Mountain and deep in the mansion.
It was the most glorious period of his life, and he was fully aware of it. He also appreciated what a rare blessing it was to recognize such a thing as it was actually happening. He felt as if he were balanced on the sizzling cusp between two worlds, one of them a complex prison of meaninglessness, the other a shimmering realm saturated with color and consequence, a place where he could extend his arm and watch multi-hued meanings flow effortlessly from his brush. It was this second world that he was accessing and materializing on the canvas, and he felt that his muse was guiding him unerringly in his efforts. Never before had he felt such a fulsome sense of precision and rightness in his work.
Nor had he ever known, with such certainty, the precise instant when the flow of inspiration stopped and a particular painting was finished. It happened at 5 p.m. sharp on the end of the third day. One moment he was painting furiously, and the next, the fire inside him had gone out.
His hand was still raised with a loaded brush, and it froze in mid-stroke. It trembled. He watched it with alarm. The hand fell to his side, a drop of russet-colored paint fell from the brush to the floor, and he wavered in a moment of confusion. With an effort he raised the brush to apply another stroke, but this produced such a violent sense of restraint, like a shock wave emanating from the canvas to repel him, that he staggered back and nearly lost his balance.
Finished. A voice whispered the word. He whipped around to see who was there in the basement with him, but then he recognized the source of the word. It had been spoken by the same inner voice that used to ask where his creativity came from—a voice that had gone silent during this new phase of life. Now it spoke again . . . Finished . . . like the wings of a dragonfly brushing his ear. In the silence that followed, Thornton scanned his inner world and discovered with horror that his sense of coursing vitality, which had remained constant these three days, had vanished. His sense of being guided by an unerring instinct had disappeared as well. In place of both was a sense of utter lostness, like being stranded in an arctic wilderness, accompanied by an aching hollowness in his chest and gut. The latter was so acute, he could almost imagine someone had stolen his inner organs.
He huffed a heavy breath, and it took all his strength to suck in the next one. His head threatened to loll back on his neck. If he had eaten any food in the mansion that day, he would have suspected that Anthony had drugged him.
The painting. He had to look at it, had to see what he had created, the image of the world that had so savagely possessed him. But his vision blurred when he tried to focus on it. He blinked, refocused, and looked again. But in place of his painting, he saw only a milky impression, as though his eyeballs were coated with a film of mucus. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eye sockets, blinked several times more, and tried yet again.
This time, not only was the problem still there, but it had actually grown worse. Now he was unable to see even the outline of the canvas. It was as though a wraith the color of old milk were hovering on the easel, rippling slightly like a roiling vapor. And beyond the canvas, in the alcove, he saw five more wraiths, five more rancid-yellow blurs or blanks that obscured his paintings.
At that moment, Tony Anthony came walking through the sheet-covered figures of his secret gallery.
“Erik,” he said. It was his rich baritone voice, not his mealy, fiendish one. “My friend, how is it coming?” He looked unchanged from when Thornton had last seen him, more than two weeks ago. He even wore the same clothes. His eyes, however, were perfectly aligned.
Thornton looked at him, then at the herd of wraiths, and then back at his patron. He cleared his throat and attempted to control his mounting panic. “I think . . . I mean, I believe I’ve finished.”
Anthony merely graced him with a stiff smile before turning to look at the new painting. He slowly ran his hand over his chin and then tapped his nose with his index finger.
Thornton’s panic boiled within him while Anthony contemplated the picture. What was the mad millionaire seeing? What was the source of that sickly, milky optical phenomenon that partially clouded his vision? What was going on here?
“Hmm,” Anthony said. Then he said it again: “Hmm.” And then, “Ha!”
Thornton used the lull to press his hands to his eyes again. When he lowered his hands, he found that some of the yellow milkiness had now claimed Anthony himself. He face was suffused with a soft vaporish glow. Through it, Thornton could see that his eyes had crossed again.
“Yes! You are, indeed, finished,” Anthony said. There was a tightness in his voice that suggested a fiercely restrained undercurrent of joy. “I judged you correctly. You’ll be pleased to know, the painting is worth every penny I said I would pay you.” He clasped his hands before him in a prayer-like gesture and shook them with his next words for emphasis. “Thank you, Erik. Thank you sincerely for your service. Now, come upstairs and I’ll pay you the rest of what you are owed.” With that, he turned and walked back through the shrouded gallery of statues.
Thornton followed automatically. He tagged behind Anthony like a child fleeing the dark. The shrouded shapes of Anthony’s secret gallery seemed to stare down at him with malicious disdain. A thrill of terror washed through him at the thought of seeing those statues uncovered, with their colorless stone faces and empty eyes.
He found his host waiting for him at the top of the stairs. Tony Anthony led him to a cramped study located just off the foyer, where there was a signed check waiting on top of a cherrywood desk. Anthony removed a pen from a ceramic holder and wrote down an amount considerably higher than they had agreed upon. “For your troubles,” he said as he handed the check to Thornton, who looked at the amount without expression.
“Thank you again,” Anthony said. “It’s been a pleasure.”
He walked out to the entryway and up to the front door, which was opening on its own. Thornton followed. When he paused before Anthony, he saw that his host was smiling at him with the same crazy expression he had worn at the Mondrago Gallery, nearly three weeks ago. Thornton looked away and walked through the door. It whispered shut behind him. He stood alone on the front steps in the silence and mist. The mansion was now a secured fortress, and he
was no longer welcome.
When he started the engine to his car, no birds fluttered from the trees. No leaf or needle blew on the branches lining the drive. As he motored slowly away, passed through the iron gate, and coasted down The Mountain toward the city, he had the sense that he was in the process of awakening from one dream, only to enter another. But the one he was now entering was merely his former life, seen through new eyes. Seen from the vantage point of emptiness.
7. The Arrival
Three months later, Bernard Powers held another showing of Thornton’s works at the Mondrago Gallery. This was more a gesture of friendship than an act of artistic commerce.
Powers had noticed a distinct change in Thornton’s manner in the weeks following the end of his association with Tony Anthony. It was the same change noticed by all who knew the young artist. Thornton was no longer so angry and intense. These qualities, which had previously defined him and his work, had left and been replaced by a brooding distance. Thornton often failed to respond when addressed directly in conversation. He spent a lot of time staring into space, out of windows, at the ceiling or floor, any direction that did not require him to focus on another person, to make eye contact or establish a direct line of human communication.
After his final return from The Mountain, he’d immediately started to paint again, but his latest works reflected his new temperament. The select crowd who had followed his early work were nonplussed by the steady stream of icy melancholy that now poured from his brush. They might have embraced the change, if there had been some spark of his earlier fire in the new work, but such was not the case. The new paintings were as spiritually empty and desiccated as the subjects they depicted: deserted corridors, empty park benches, hulking angular shapes like icebergs, and a mountain, repainted many times, with what might have been a house on top, only the structure was difficult to identify because it was obscured by a milky yellow cloud.
